Why is there still a lot of unsolved math problems, despite having really advanced computers?
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There are many problems that exist in life because we don’t know if there’s an easier way to solve it. It could be that it is not a solvable problem. It could be that we haven’t found the answer yet.
Let’s say you wake up one day and you want a unicorn. You look around and – no unicorns. It could be that unicorns actually exist in a remote jungle somewhere – but that means crossings off jungles one at a time and making sure theres no unicorns in there (It could be that unicorns exist, and we’ve just never looked in the right spot (After we found unicorn island, it’s super easy)), It could be that you could make a unicorn via genetic engineering, It could be that unicorns don’t actually exist and you can’t figure out a way to make one either, but maybe we could get a good enough approximation of a unicorn by getting a horse and dressing it up in fancy clothes and a horn. We don’t know until we try and even then there could be a long round of nothing before we give up or have some intuition about some thing.
Math is the same way. Computers are still pretty bad at intuition. They can sometimes figure a solution out by trying a trillion things and seeing if any of them fit. We don’t know if a solution is out there, or there is no solution, or if some mathematician in 50 years will figure something brilliant out that everybody has missed up to this point. Sometimes we don’t need exact solutions and we can sort of make do by getting close enough and a lot of the super computers are really useful in this area also.
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